The annual commemoration of the fallen in the
world wars and small wars Britain has been involved in takes place on the nearest Sunday to "Remembrance Day", 11 November. On
that day in 1918, at 11 o'clock in the morning, the guns fell silent on the
western front for the first time since August 1914. The fact that this year is
the ninetieth anniversary of that event means that it is being marked with
especial intensity. But in Britain at least, there is also something of the
routine about the way that the first world war has become the principal focus
of the "festival of remembrance". It can seem even that the British
are obsessed by this conflict above all others.

Dan Todman is senior lecturer in history at Queen Mary College, University of London. He is the author of The Great War: Myth and Memory (Hambledon, 2005) The remembering of major national events is
bound to change over time. What makes the current British memorialising of the
1914-18 war fascinating is the way it combines fairly fixed concerns and
narratives with novel voices and forms of inquiry. That makes it too an
interesting case of how societies in the process of exploring their past can
resist as well as embrace a deeper encounter with it.

Two discourses:
fluid and fixed

The interest starts with the disjuncture
between public and academic discourses about the 1914-18 war. The public image
of what the war was like (bloody and muddy) and meant (pointless) has remained strikingly constant over the last four decades. Yet for a large part of this period - since the late 1980s - there
has also been a remarkable boom in scholarship about the war which has introduced
new methods. The increasing expectation that work will cross disciplinary and national boundaries
has produced new understandings.

The process of digging into the huge archival
deposits on the war - which remained untapped until recently, despite all the
books published on the war over these nine decades - has generated a much more
complex and nuanced view of many aspects of the war. These include military
tactics, the connections between the battlefield and the "home front", popular
mobilisation, and the phenomenon of "war enthusiasm". This work has also
highlighted the degree to which earlier academic generations took post-war
rhetoric as evidence of wartime realities - over, for example, such matters as
the meaning of the war for women, the belief that the war was "futile", and the
nature of mourning:

* The long-held idea that war service had
brought women the vote obscured pre-war debates about suffrage, and concealed
the tactical decision to enfranchise older women in an effort to stem political
extremism. The notion may have enjoyed wide currency after 1918, but it cannot
be taken as evidence, that the war was a watershed - let alone "a good thing" -
for British women

* The bereavement of millions in the war, and
the mutilation of many who survived it, did make many Britons question whether
the war was worth the effort. Their response seems often to have been that it
was. This was a war that enjoyed widespread popular support, and probably more
so towards its end than at its beginning. It was only a significant period
after the war, initially as a result of the economic slump of the early 1920s,
that a belief in the war's futility gained wide acceptance

* The British experience of death looks
different in a European perspective - in particular, it makes clear that Britain
escaped relatively lightly from its brushes with total war. This is not to
downplay the tragedy of young lives cut short or to dismiss the grief that
overwhelmed some of those left behind. But it might suggest that one of the key
problems for post-war remembrance was not to heal the trauma of bereavement but
to resolve the gap between those who had lost their close kin and those who had
not.

This academic revolution has had a minimal
effect on popular remembrance. The version of the war recycled on television,
in editorials and on message-forums is consistent. The war was futile, both in
the way it was fought and in its outcome. It was uniquely horrible: a British
tragedy (any other European nation tends to get left out). A generation was
lost. Their experience is best evidenced by the work of the war poets. The war
changed everything.

The bad war

None of this is a complete misrepresentation
of what happened or what was felt at the time, but it is both selective and
partial. These symbols and interpretations can be traced back to actual wartime
experiences, and were certainly current in the inter-war period (see "World War One: Misrepresentation of a Conflict", BBC History, 19 June 2006). Only from the late 1970s, however, did
they become uncontested. They have now become the default setting for public
responses. For Britons, the first world war is the "bad war" - in contrast to
its successor - and it fulfils that function so well that no amount of improved
scholarship will shift its symbolic position. The somewhat melancholy
implication - for a society obsessed with the war as well as for the historian - is that a deeper understanding of its history cannot be used to inform our actions in the present.

A singular aspect of this orthodoxy is that as
the war has been judged ever more uniquely horrible and pointless, so its
veterans have been ever further sanctified. All those who served are deemed to have been heroes by definition
of their service; and those who served and have survived are now regarded as
particularly heroic and exemplary.

There could be no more striking evidence of
the difficulty of comprehending and representing the scale and nature of
industrialised total war. The effect of mass armies and modern munitions was to
render any equation between service and heroism largely redundant. Half the
adult male population served in the forces during the war - amongst them,
inevitably, numerous cowards, thieves, rapists, fraudsters and murderers. Many
soldiers performed administrative tasks far from the frontline. Death by
artillery-fire was no respecter of whether soldiers were running towards or
away from the enemy.

After the war, however, the problem of
reintegrating into society both those who had served and those who had lost,
and finding a narrative that could contain both, found one answer by an
emphasis on the universality of heroism. A British society that has since the
1960s grown increasingly distant from the realities of military service -
whilst remaining dedicated to it as a location for fantasy - has been unable
to move on from this rhetorical standpoint (see The Great War: Myth and Memory, Hambledon, 2005).

The personal past

If the war's public meaning now seems set in
stone as permanently as its memorials and headstones, the format in which the
meaning is represented reveals some important changes. The war's portrayal has
always been shaped by contemporary cultural mores, and commemorative
documentaries demonstrate just how much the relationship between the creators
and consumers of popular culture has changed over the last fifty years.

For the fiftieth anniversary of 1914, the BBC
commissioned the twenty-six part series The
Great War, based around archive footage and featuring interviews with
veterans. There was an authoritative narrative voice, but no presenters. For the eightieth
anniversary, it collaborated with an American television company on a
six-part series littered with academic talking-heads. For the ninetieth anniversary,
it has had a range of TV presenter-celebrities - among them Michael Palin,
Dan Snow, Natalie Cassidy and Eamonn Holmes - on a journey of discovery of
their families' military connections. These invariably culminate next to graves and memorials in a display of the right
kind of televisual emotion at the moment the formula
demands and the audience has come to expect.

The focus of these programmes - family history
as a means of understanding the past - is worthy of note in itself. It is
indicative of the dramatic growth of family history as a leisure interest,
perhaps in response to the sense of dislocation inherent in modernity. The
bureaucratic tidemark left by the great war has made it a frequent point of
departure for those on a search for (as the zeitgeist-capturing title of a
popular BBC TV series has it) who they think they are.

This obsession with the familial past also
demonstrates a demographic shift in people's relationship with the war. As
those who experienced it as children also fall prey to the ravages of time, it
has passed over the boundary of lived memory. Often, the traces are reduced to
the memory of others' trauma - the widow who never remarried, the grandfather
who still bore his wartime scars. Thanks to the combination of a consumer
culture and the growth in home ownership, many families have been left with
isolated artefacts of an ancestor's military service. These can serve as a site
for storytelling or an inspiration for investigation.

These activities can be enriching, but -
contrary to the impression that is given in books such as Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong and on Who Do You
Think You Are? - they are seldom practically or
emotionally easy. Many people simply have no viable connection to the war. Many had ancestors who left little or no trace - whether for reasons of poverty, education, personal preference or because families deliberately chose to forget them at the time.

The need to re-establish a connection between those living in Britain today and their first-world-war antecedents is a powerful motivating factor amongst many of those who seek to preserve the "memory" of war. But the notion that inheritance is the only, let alone the best, way to approach the past is arrant nonsense. To present the war only in these terms both excludes those who do not have family relics or handed-down stories, and actually inhibits the recasting of the national narrative. A society that is busy grieving for fallen heroes finds it much harder to question its assumptions about the world in which they lived and the legacy it bequeathed to later generations.

The search for family history is usually
shaped by modern preconceptions, and as such it seldom results by itself in a
deeper understanding of the past. The modern experience of finding someone who
shares your surname on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website, taking a
day trip to France and finding his grave (perhaps with a cathartic tear or few)
might increase a person's or family's sense of emotional connection to the war,
and may bring other satisfactions. Insofar as it is led not by a direct
connection with a loved one, however, but by what television has "taught" as right conduct, it can seldom encourage a more profound appreciation of what the war meant for those who fought it, why they kept fighting, or why they died.

Beyond the
trenches

The web is frequently celebrated as a key route
to more extensive engagement. It holds out the potential to democratise the
study of the past, both by making expert knowledge (not always from within the
academy) available and by making primary evidence more widely accessible. In
large part, however, it has yet to fulfil that promise. The desperate desire
for interactivity that drives much of the BBC's web presence, for example, gets
large numbers of visitors, but tends to result in more interesting or better
informed voices being drowned out in the rush to rehearse the "facts" that the
war was a futile tragedy directed by donkeys.

Moreover, online remembrance projects are
usually shaped by cultural concerns and received wisdoms - so that, for
example, they concentrate on the resources of most use to family historians or
receive submissions from those with a story to tell about a soldier, and
exclude those who were exempted from service on medical grounds or who objected
on grounds of conscience.

The communities formed around discussion
forums are frequently close and to a degree replicate the "fictive kinships" that
grew up around remembrance immediately after the war, but they are often
similarly exclusive and can pose significant entry barriers for the
uninitiated.

Yet the web also offers grounds for hope.
Projects such as The Great War Archive,
which combine popular interest in the war with specialist expertise, and which
recognise that an archive is different from a tribute or a memorial, suggest
that it is possible to create high-quality content based on user submissions.

As academics increasingly post their research
and teaching online, not least to attract students in a competitive market,
they will be forced to work out strategies to engage directly with wider
audiences which can circumvent the division between mass market and elite
history. A key element of that is likely to be the exploitation of popular
enthusiasm to encourage thought, rather than to enforce the "correct" opinion.
Such strategies, however, depend on being able to talk critically and honestly
about the soldiers of the great war. It is only when the conflict has
receded by at least one more generation that that will become possible.